A s we wave goodbye to this century's early childhood and think back on the last 10 years, it is clear that the past decade was the one of the mashup. Danger Mouse released his historic Grey Album in 2004; Girltalk brought his laptops to Dewick in 2007; and, thanks to a recent Miley Cyrus hit, Biggie's "Party and Bulls−−t" made a comeback in the form of the ever−popular 2009 mashup, "Party and Bulls−−t in the USA."
The art of the mashup has not evolved without resistance. The style has always been subject to complaints about its "unoriginal" and "exploitative" nature and, more dangerously, to strict copyright laws that were instituted to promote creativity but, in failing to change along with technological advancement, have begun to do the opposite.
Even so, mixers of the world have worked hard to prove that the basis of their medium has worth and that, when put together, two pieces of art have the potential to create new meaning or value that is not present in either piece individually. Basically, that when you mix two things, you're not just copying: You're creating.
To get to my point, though, it seems bizarre that contemporary mashup artists have to struggle to win merit for their practice because the concept behind it had been around well before some DJ realized that every one of Jay−Z's song fit perfectly with another song you know.
Forget even that musical artists in the '70s, '80s and '90s experimented with similar concepts of mixing; we've been doing it for centuries with words.
You witness word mashups every day. They'll come out when we jumble our words or thoughts by accident and utter what is linguistically known as a "blend," a common speech error (e.g. "great" and "cool" become "grool").
But even more frequently, we create them intentionally to talk about a concept that lacks an existing word to describe it. In such cases, we have two practical options. We can create words by compounding existing words, as we do with "thumbtack," "cartwheel" and "eyebrow," etc., or we can get a little more creative and form new words by compounding only segments of existing words.
Portmanteaus, as these words are called, are perfect to describe new concepts formed by the synthesis of existing ones because the word structure does just that; "smog" is the combination of "smoke" and "fog;" "brunch" is the combination of "breakfast" and lunch;" "Jazzercise" is the combination of "jazz" and "exercise."
So while you may be inclined to name Danger Mouse the father of mashup, the title seems more appropriately reserved for the man behind the portmanteau itself, the author Lewis Carroll.
In the first chapter of "Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There" (1872), the sequel to "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" (1865), Alice reads a poem titled "Jabberwocky" that is not only written in mirror image but also in completely made up words, many of them portmanteaus. Some of the more entertaining ones in the poem include "slithy" (slimy + lithe), "mimsy" (miserable + flimsy) and my personal favorite, "chortled" (chuckled + snorted).
Later on in the book, Carroll has his character Humpty Dumpty use the word "portmanteau" (which is a traveling bag, generally one that opens into two compartments) to explain the meaning behind the poem's silly words to Alice: "You see, it's like a portmanteau — there are two meanings packed up into one word."
So while mashup artists may fail to see the relation between their work and that of Lewis Carroll, I think it's safe to say that critics of the remix should reacquaint themselves with their Mother Goose Rhyme characters; Humpty Dumpty certainly would have seen the value of the Grey Album.
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Romy Oltuski is a junior majoring in English. She can be reached at Romy.Oltuski@tufts.edu.
